Walk into a boutique with a budget and a shortlist, and there's a very real tendency to go for the sensible choice. You're probably paying full retail, after months of waiting for that call, and there's probably a very real subtext in your mind as to what that watch would fetch if you decided to move it out of your collection one day. So you end up with the reference that everyone else agrees on, perhaps the one with the nice safe black or blue dial, and you'll end up talking yourself out of the more interesting one that you actually spent the most time looking at. The secondary market takes a lot of that pressure off. The blow of walking out of the boutique with a brand new watch has already been taken by someone else, and the asking price will generally be what the collectors think the watch is worth rather than what the brand would like it to be worth. If a pre-owned watch doesn't quite click after six months, you can move on, and it'll sting a lot less. Discontinued Watches: Slow Sellers You Can Buy Pre-OwnedBrands stop making watches for all sorts of reasons, and a very common one is that they just don't sell enough. The Patek Philippe Neptune is a good case in point. The 5085/1A came out in the late 1990s as a sort of middle ground between the Nautilus and the more dressy Patek pieces. It had a moon phase and power reserve display in addition to the date, was powered by a micro-rotor movement, and came in a 37mm steel case that was just 9.6mm thick. But it never really took off, and Patek discontinued it in 2005.